This School In Rural Illinois Has Produced Some Of The Most Amazing Visionaries In Tech

UIUC has bred some of the most remarkable tech visionaries in history.Flickr/VSmithUKThe University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) is in a small college town located about 150 miles south of Chicago.

Surrounded by corn and soybean fields, Urbana-Champaign doesn't strike you at first as a place where future tech leaders would emerge from.

It's why many people fail to realize that UIUC has bred some of the most remarkable tech visionaries in history. They built companies that essentially changed tech history as we know it.

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Marc Andreessen — Netscape, Andreessen-Horowitz

Andreessen Horowitz founder Marc Andreessen.
REUTERS/Fred Prouser

Andreessen invented Mosaic, the browser that popularized the web, when he was still at UIUC in 1992. He graduated from UIUC's computer science program in 1993 and was only 22 years old when he was recruited by the legendary entrepreneur Jim Clark to start Netscape Communications. Together, they created Netscape Navigator, one of the first and most widely used commercial web browsers ever.

Andreessen also cofounded Opsware (formerly Loudcloud) and sold it to HP for $1.6 billion in 2007. He now runs Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most prominent venture capital firms in Silicon Valley.

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Larry Ellison — Oracle

Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison.
Stephen Lam/Reuters

Ellison, who founded Oracle, grew up outside of Chicago and attended UIUC for two years. Although he dropped out after his sophomore year because his adoptive mother had died, Ellison showed signs of brilliance at an early age, even being named the science student of the year at UIUC.

Since its founding in 1977, Oracle went on to become one of the largest enterprise tech companies in the world. Last year, it had over $38 billion in revenue, with more than 122,000 employees worldwide. Ellison is the third-richest man on the Forbes List with a net worth of $52.5 billion.

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Max Levchin — PayPal

PayPal cofounder Max Levchin.
Wil Matthews

Levchin, a computer science grad in 1997, is one of the cofounders of the online money transfer service PayPal. The cofounders of PayPal, widely known as "PayPal Mafia," also include Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

Martin Eberhard — Tesla

Most people associate Tesla with its current CEO, Elon Musk, but it was Eberhard (computer engineering grad) who first incorporated the company in 2003 with Marc Tarpenning. Eberhard served as CEO until 2007, while Musk was its largest investor and chairman.

Jeremy Stoppelman — Yelp

Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman.
Eric Risberg/AP

Stoppelman founded Yelp, the online reviewing site, in 2004, after graduating from UIUC's computer engineering program in 1999. He spent some time at PayPal while attending Harvard Business School but dropped out to start Yelp.

Stoppelman was the VP of engineering at PayPal and is often mentioned as one of the "PayPal Mafia" members. At PayPal, he also met Max Levchin, who was one of the early investors of Yelp.

Yelp is now publicly traded and had revenue of roughly $232 million in 2013.

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Thomas Siebel — Siebel Systems

Siebel Systems founder Thomas Siebel.
AP

Siebel, the founder of Siebel Systems, earned his bachelor's, master's, and MBA at UIUC.

Siebel Systems was a leading software company that sold CRM applications, until it was acquired by Oracle for $5.8 billion in 2005.

Ray Ozzie — Lotus Notes

Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie.
Fred Prouser/Reuters

Ozzie was a computer science student at UIUC when he started working on PLATO system, which later evolved into Lotus Notes, one of the earliest enterprise collaboration software tools. Lotus was later sold to IBM for $3.5 billion.

Ozzie then founded another collaboration startup, Groove, which was acquired by Microsoft. He then served as CTO and chief software architect at Microsoft from 2005 to 2010. At age 59 he just launched another startup, a collaborative voice-calling app called Talko.

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Jerry Sanders — AMD

AMD founder Jerry Sanders.
Reuters

AMD, the semiconductor company that makes computer processors, was founded in 1969 by Sanders and seven former Fairchild Semiconductor employees.

Sanders was director of marketing at Fairchild and is known for being one of the best salespeople in the semiconductor industry. He turned AMD into one of the biggest competitors of Intel at one point, and he is widely credited for helping drop chip prices.